Page 33 of All Her Ghosts

They followed me.

God, what was I thinking? I shouldn’t have gone out there. But I didn’t think—the living never see me, even when I’m in my own actual meat. I thought I could go without anyone noticing, but I should have known better. The living never see me, but the dead always do.

I swallow hard. The news broadcast cuts off. The room falls silent, wide eyes staring at Mr. Snider.

Quiet as a mouse, someone ventures, “Is it a teacher?”

Grim, Mr. Snider shakes his head. “It is not. Turn off your phones. Anything with a battery, shut it down. If there’s nothing for them to eat, they’ll leave.”

He’s wrong. They won’t, I know it. They’re too solid, too purposeful. They’re not shambling memories—they need something.

They needme.

Knock-knock-knock.

Dizzy, I struggle to climb to my feet. Bas rolls to his, hauling me up by the elbow.

“Butweare what they eat,” a boy says. “They suck the life out of people. Last year in Boston—”

“Quiet,” a girl hisses, “they can hear you.”

Knock-knock-knock, louder now. The door jumps with the force of each rigidly patient blow, something out there pretending very hard to be human again.Knock-knock-knock.

The crucifix barricade shudders at the force, bouncing in its slot. With little more than two arms of a bike rack holding it in place, it slips farther out of joint with every blow. No one really thought it would come to this. No one could have tested for this kind of concentrated effort. Anotherknock-knock-knockand the wood hops sideways, rattling loose.

Mr. Snider leaps forward. Stone-faced, he jams the barricade back into place. But I reached through a railroad-spike-studded foundation for a taste of a ley line—this is a gap of maybe five inches. Touching the wood closes the loop that began with a ghostly fist on the outside of the door.

Mr. Snider seizes, color draining, and crashes to the floor.

The knocking stops. The room falls cold.

Slowly, like someone learning how, Mr. Snider stands back up. Face slack, he stares around the room. Transfixed, barely breathing, I stare back. His eyes glitter strangely behind his big aviator glasses, glassy andwhite-glazed. His hair loses its color, a washed-out gray seeping from his roots.

“Oh my god,” the scratching girl whispers. “He’s possessed.”

“That’s a thing?” her friend demands. “That’s not supposed to be a thing!”

Everyone recoils against the wall, huddling together, unceremoniously shoving the kids who got bits of the ghost kit to the front. The scratching girl bears her lighter like a sword. The sage thief lights his bundle off it. Someone else catches a palmful of lavender seeds on fire and tosses them, smoking, to the ground in front of my boots.

Mr. Snider doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even see them. He never looks away from me—or from Bas at my side—opal eyes flickering between us. Hair entirely gray now, his mouth works with difficulty, voice breaking in and out, distant and strange.

“It’s you,” a woman’s voice says.

“You…gone.” A man’s voice. “Searched. Lost.”

A child: “Found you. Please.Please.”

Doubling over and over, at least a dozen voices, saying, “Please, please.”

Solemn, Bas steps in front of me, holding out a hand. I try to warn him, open my mouth withdon’talready on my lips but I can’t get the word out. My vision doubles, guttering, threatening to fail. The pressure rises, swallowing me, and it’s not the ocean I hear, but a vast black river. The ghosts inside Mr. Snider fall still.

“Don’t.”

“Understand.”

“Have.”

“Nothing.”